TYRANT:  Wednesday 10PM on FX FX’s TYRANT has never been as incisive or daring as it could have been, given its incendiary setting in a fictional Middle Eastern nation on the brink of revolution, but it’s a survivor, back on the air for its third season.  After an unengaging initial run, the series remade […]

  SILICON VALLEY:  Sunday 10PM on HBO – DVR Alert There’s no algorithm (yet) to predict compatibility between TV series, so we don’t know yet how SILICON VALLEY will fare in the ratings, or for that matter how its quality will hold up over time, but based on its pilot, it seems to be as […]

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD:  Monday 8PM on CBS The opening half of CBS’s doubleheader of new Monday sitcoms has one joke to tell in its pilot, and it spends half an hour telling it over and over.  THE NEIGHBORHOOD is almost exclusively about the hilarity of a midwestern white family moving into a black Los Angeles […]

  NOTORIOUS:  Thursday 9PM on ABC – Change the Channel Any viewer apt to complain about the over-the-top melodrama of Scandal should be forced to watch the pilot for Notorious, a supposed “drama” so consistently idiotic that it’s closer in tone to the self-mocking theatrics of Jane the Virgin.  As it happens, Notorious is filling […]

  FALLING SKIES – Sunday 9PM on TNT   WHERE WE WERE:  On our way into a spaceship.  The aliens have arrived, and contrary to what Executive Producer Steven Spielberg used to tell us, they’re not nice at all.  The ones in FALLING SKIES murdered most of the human race, and the only reason some […]

  MERCY STREET:  Sunday 10PM on (many) PBS stations – Potential DVR Alert PBS isn’t accustomed to acting like a conventional “network,” and so it took the service until the very last episodes of Downton Abbey to do what any normal network would have done years ago:  use Downton as a platform to launch a […]

  PARENTHOOD:  Tuesday 10PM on NBC   WHERE WE WERE:  The wedding of Crosby (Dax Shepard) and Jasmine (Joy Bryant), an event long in coming, considering that they’ve been raising Jabbar (Tyree Brown) together and were initially engaged two seasons earlier.  The joyous event was made more joyous when Mark (Jason Ritter) asked Sarah (Lauren […]

  ROGUE:  Wednesday 9PM on Audience Network (DirecTV only) – Change the Channel Remember when the phrase “cable drama” only implied a cheaper, racier version of a network cop show?  Subscribers to DirecTV can relive those years with ROGUE, its newest original programming and a series that gives Red Widow a run for its money […]